"What was the matter with you?"
"I had toothache."
"That was your own fault. What business have you with' teeth at your age?"
Well, on that day, poor old Cartier! (I am referring to the day of our game),—on that day, to use a gaming term, I took a fine tooth out of his head. We played for five hours on end, always doubling; I won six hundred small glasses of absinthe from him. We should have played longer, and you may judge what an ocean of absinthe Cartier would have owed me, if Auguste had not come to look for him.
Auguste was one of Cartier's sons: his father stood in great awe of him; he put his finger to his lips to ask me to keep mum. I was as generous as was Alexander in the matter of the family of Porus.
I let Cartier go, without demanding my winnings from him. And Gondon and I reckoned up the account. Reduced to money, the six hundred small glasses of absinthe would have produced a total of eighteen hundred sous—that is to say, ninety francs. I could have paid the journey to Paris a dozen times over. My mother had good cause to say, "My boy, God is on your side."
My mother was very uneasy when I returned home; she knew what folly I was capable of, when I had got an idea into my head, and it was therefore with some anxiety that she asked me where I had been. Generally, when I had been to Camberlin's, I took a roundabout way in telling her of it. My poor mother, foreseeing what passions would one day surge in me, was afraid that gaming might be one of them. In several of her surmises she was correct; but at any rate she was completely mistaken in this one. So I told her what had just happened. How the Piranèses had brought us in fifty francs, and how M. Cartier was going to pay my fare to Paris. But these blessings from heaven brought sadness with them, for they meant our separation. I did my best to comfort her by telling her that the separation would be only for a little while, and that as soon as I had obtained a berth at fifteen hundred francs, she should leave Villers-Cotterets also and come and join me; but my mother knew that a berth at fifteen hundred francs was an Eldorado, difficult to discover.